Holy crap. At first I thought maybe it was a pro-woman ad but that didn’t last long. No company, of course, could get away with an ad quite as bad as that today. That doesn’t mean they don’t still hire that way.

Well if we’re going to talk poses, one thing that dates it for me is how demure they are. It’s as if someone passed a decree that knees must always be bared, but the maximum allowable distance between each knee is approximately one inch.

That was one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in along time. At first I thought it was the album cover for some obscure and very large 60s folk band called The Losers.

Then the text made it sound like some sort of expensive brothel run by the Mafia. How exactly is their “stamina” tested? Sounds sinister to me. Are the “pretty good” ones who fail allowed to go to all the other places that would gladly hire them or do they have to “disappear” because the know too much?

MST3K has several DVDs worth of snarking over old “public service”short films (on proper bathing and grooming, on how to behave in public, etc.), information/sales (why springs are important, brands of grocery-store ice cream freezers, how to water ski), and education (why study home ec, why take shop class, etc.). One thing that leaps out and bites me in the eye every time is just how gendered society was in the 1950s – 1970s. Also how dreadful women’s lives were. Did one of your socks slip down because the elastic was loose? Well, if you’re a girl, then you’ve just ruined some guy’s afternoon, and how dare you subject him to your slovenly self?!? Would you like to learn to water-ski? Well, if you’re not stunningly beautiful and graceful, then you just appall any man forced to look at you.

I am old enough to remember the “My wife–I think I’ll keep her!” ads for coffee. I’m also young enough to have watched the Enjoli perfume commercials (where the gorgeous woman can “bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and never, ever let you forget you’re a man” and wonder why the heck the man couldn’t get up off his duff and cook dinner once in awhile.

I guess that accounts for the artifact between her knee and the heel of the woman virtually in her lap. But not for the latter’s suggestive finger positioning, or the overall motif of discomfort and humiliation – “the losers” don’t even get a bench to sit on.

Softcore sadoporn, selling the implication that larger-breasted job applicants fared well at Eastern. (And who can doubt that they did?)

For all you whippersnappers and chronic lawn trespassers: Miami-based Eastern Airlines, long since bankrupt, pioneered many of the corporation-hollowing-out and pension-fund-heisting techniques now all the fashion in the executive class.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

Incidentally, the term “intersectionality” was coined by a black woman law professor to address just these cases. The new anti-discrimination law, judges frequently decided, banned hiring decisions based on race, and banned hiring decisions based on sex, but there was no entitlement to bring a case on “combined race and sex discrimination”. Thus, separate causes of actions were filed and separate trials held, with the company allowed to present black men’s promotions as evidence that they weren’t racist and white women’s promotions as evidence that weren’t sexist, so the inability of black women to move forward even when more qualified must be a statistical artifact of a bunch of women with bad personalities (read: bitches) getting what they deserved.

Companies that had the courage of their bigoted convictions even argued, “Well, maybe we were being racist, but look! All women! Maybe we were being sexist – find us innocent of racism!” in the race discrimination trial and the reverse argument in the sexism trial.

It was sick. I’m glad US trial court judges can’t get away with that separate action bullshit anymore.